Corruption

Well, The Gang of Six has played from the first tee of Project 2025, deep sixing sanity and honesty in governance. What surprised the shit out of me when I found out about Chevron was just how ridiculously recent it was/is: 1984. Any government that would put technical matters into the hands of illiterate and innumerate judges is beyond stupid.

The immediate effect, and you can bet your Bippy that the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut judges will be going full force on Monday, will be to abolish any regulation they don't like. The Gang of Six say they can. Say good bye to clean air, clean water, and consumer protection. Climate change will officially be a hoax. We, as a nation, will return to the thrilling days of yesteryear: the lawless Wild West. Social Dqrwinism will rule. Now, couple that with the intrusion of computerized automation in all production, and the American Capitalist will soon enough rue the day they promoted these asshats. We already see the increasing use of capital in production, and the resulting lowering of labor's share. Ever more automation leads to either, 1) more product with the same amount of labor, or 2) more or less constant output with reduced labor. Guess which the typical American Capitalist prefers?

The immediate, and only, cause of Great Recessions and Great Depressions is collapse of demand. And, of course, collapse of demand derives from loss of GDP from labor. Which is what MARF^™(party like it's 1115) is all about. But, with The Gang of Six now in control, Don Jr. will take over if wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 keels over. No election result will be abided. The American Kim.

I bet you think this is satire?

By The Numbers - part the fifty seventh

And you think that your tin-can-and-string telephone is wonky. How about this:

Since the problem surfaced in November, engineers had been working to diagnose and resolve the issue, a tedious and lengthy process complicated by the fact that it takes almost two days to send and receive information from Voyager 1, which was the first man-made object ever to enter interstellar space and is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth.
[my emphasis]

Thought For The Day - 28 June 2024

Boy howdy!! DebateGPT sure would have leveled the playing field. I guess I need to bring in a supply of brown shirts.

Chevron

You've seen the write up, yes? So now, Boeing et al, can do as they wish with safety or performance or anything unless Congress has explicitly written into law what NTSB and FAA can do, and how. Hello 19th Century. Social Darwinism will cull the herd toot sweet. Hydroxychloroquine for all that ails ya.

Luckily, we know folks in Canada. I'm sure they'll adopt us. Won't they?

Liar, Liar - part the second

Wouldn't it be nice if, during tonight's "debate", CNN and the other Left Wing media ran their own version of AI to trap Alzheimer's Ronnie, II lies in real time, and chyron the facts over his sagging face? Wouldn't it be nice?

The Supremes just gave them the Big OK, as it happens.

Mass Production

Going way back, I've been puzzled by the euphoria over 500 channels of cab/sat teeVee. There's a line - "57 channels (and nothin' on)". Let's see if we can find the source... Springsteen/1992, although I do have a lower brain stem memory of something similar with a hundreds number. Anyway...

Today we find the NFL still in court over its attempt to keep most of the moolah for itself. As the Eccles quote says, ya gots to move the product far and wide if the whole edifice can work.

"This is a day and age when everyone says, 'I want my things on my time, whenever I want it,'" said Phil de Picciotto, the president and founder of Octagon, a sports marketing firm. "But that's impossible for businesses to deliver," he said. "Low cost comes with mass products."

Ah, the good olde days when there were just 3 networks (4 if you count Dumont RIP, and a host of unaffilateds) to divide up the advert spend.

Now, it can legitimately be argued that doling out games isn't quite the capital intensive adventure as making EVs instead of gas guzzlers. The cab/sat infrastructure has been around for decades, almost as long as over-the-air broadcast. 1948, initially as a means to move airwave teeVee past mountains and such. As well as a boon to fly-over land where household antennas just weren't high enough or large enough to capture signal from distant cities even with flat country in between.

Then again, YouTube has to recoup its investment, too, so consumers aren't necessarily going to get supercheap subscriptions. The plan now costs $350 a year, on top of the subscription to YouTube TV.

One might wonder how much of that 'investment' is in physical capital, and how much is in soft-costs like license rights and such.

More choices means, inevitably, less TAM for each choice which means higher cost and lower profit per. There's a reason the high-brow cab/sat teeVee channels luv them there bundles.

Uncle Clarence

[I penned this essay before I knew Amy displayed an ounce of sense. Thanks for asking.]

As if it weren't obvious, Uncle Clarence has gone very far off the deep end. The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts deep end. Yes, that one, the 'don't let domestic abusers get guns' case. Uncle Clarence says that, since the 18th century didn't define domestic abuse nor pass laws protecting the victims, it is WRONG today to keep guns out of the hands of abusers. Keep in mind that in 1800, wimins had few specific rights.

It was not until the 1870's that the first states banned a man's right to beat his family.

Uncle Clarence made sure he went further into 'history' (page 78). As many have observed about the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts, cruelty is the point.

The Government does not offer a single historical regulation that is relevantly similar to §922(g)(8).

So, in other words, since male chauvanist pigs were allowed to slap the wimins around back then, and, evidently, even shoot them, nowadays should be the same. There's that olde famous saying,

The law must be stable but it must not stand still.

Uncle Clarence wants 'the law' to stay in 1791, other amendments and considerable changes to socity be damned. The Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts cabal always rejoin - "if it's so imporant, then amend the Constitution!". Which is a nice idea, except for the fact that the FF made amending difficult, in part because that's what they wanted, but also because society didn't change very fast before the Civil War (not because of it, just because progress sped up about that time). The world is not linear, and that includes progress. If the judiciary doesn't take account of the "relative" meaning of some text of the Constitution (as amended) vis-a-vis today, we'd be thrown back into the unfettered social Darwinism of 1800. A few would be happy. The rest miserable.

Absolutism of 1789 is pernicious.

Uncle Clarence was the lone dissent.